Peanut Gallery: I admit it, I lost faith at half-time. But I did switch back for the last 5 min of the game. All I can say: It was shock and awe time. Tom Brady and the Patriots pulled off the NFL comeback of the century.
So, for those of you who might have missed some of the game – here’s a YouTube highlight re-cap. Enjoy, unless you’re a Falcons fan.
February 2nd, 2017 | Washington Hilton
America will succeed as long as our most vulnerable citizens — and we have some that are so vulnerable — have a path to success. And America will thrive as long as we continue to have faith in each other and faith in God.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Mark. So nice. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s a great honor to be here this morning. And so many faith leaders — very, very important people to me — from across our magnificent nation, and so many leaders from all across the globe.
Today we continue a tradition begun by President Eisenhower some 64 years ago. This gathering is a testament to the power of faith, and is one of the great customs of our nation, and I hope to be here seven more times with you. (Laughter and applause.)
I want very much to thank our co-chairs, Senator Bowzman and Senator Coons, and all of the congressional leadership — they’re all over the place. We have a lot of very distinguished guests.
And we have one guest who was just sworn in last night — Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State. (Applause.) Going to do a great job. Some people didn’t like Rex because he actually got along with leaders of the world. I said, no, you have to understand, that’s a good thing. (Laughter.) That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. He’s respected all over the world, and I think he’s going to go down as one of our great, great secretaries. We appreciate it. Thank you, thank you, Rex. (Applause.)
Thank you as well to Senate Chaplain Barry Black for his moving words. And I don’t know, Chaplain, whether or not that’s an appointed position. Is that an appointed position? I don’t even know if you’re a Democrat or if you’re a Republican, but I’m appointing you for another year — the hell with it. (Laughter and applause.) And I think it’s not even my appointment, it’s the Senate’s appointment, but we’ll talk to them. Your son is here. Your job is very, very secure, okay? (Laughter.) Thank you, Barry. Appreciate it very much.
I also want to thank my great friends, though, Roma. Where’s Roma? Beautiful Roma Downey. The voice of an angel. She’s got the voice — every time I hear it, that voice is so beautiful. Everything is so beautiful about Roma, including her husband because he’s a special, special friend, Mark Burnett — for the wonderful introduction. So true. So true. I said to the agent, I’m sorry. The only thing more — I actually got on the phone and fired him myself because he said, you don’t want to do it, it’ll never work, it’ll never, ever work. You don’t want to do it. I said, listen — but I really fired him after it became the number-one show. It became so successful, and he wanted a commission, and he didn’t want to do it. That’s what I really said. (Laughter.)
But we had tremendous success on “The Apprentice.” And when I ran for President, I had to leave the show. That’s when I knew for sure I was doing it. And they hired a big, big movie star — Arnold Schwarzenegger -– to take my place. And we know how that turned out. (Laughter.) The ratings went right down the tubes. It’s been a total disaster. And Mark will never, ever bet against Trump again. And I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those ratings, okay? (Laughter.)
But we’ve had an amazing life together, the last 14, 15 years. And an outstanding man, and thank you very much for introducing me. Appreciate it. It’s a great honor. (Applause.)
I also want to thank my dear friend, Vice President Mike Pence, who has been incredible. (Applause.) And incredible wife, Karen. And every time I was in a little trouble with something, where they were questioning me, they’d say, but he picked Mike Pence — (laughter) — so he has to know what he’s doing. And it’s true, he’s been — you know, on the scale of 0 to 10, I rate him a 12, okay? So I want to thank you. Thank you very much. Apprentice it. (Applause.)
But most importantly today, I want to thank the American people. Your faith and prayers have sustained me and inspired me through some very, very tough times. All around America, I have met amazing people whose words of worship and encouragement have been a constant source of strength. What I hear most often as I travel the country are five words that never, ever fail to touch my heart. That’s: “I am praying for you.” I hear it so often — “I am praying for you, Mr. President.” (Applause.)
No one has inspired me more in my travels than the families of the United States military, men and women who have put their lives on the line every day for their country and their countrymen. I just came back yesterday from Dover Air Force Base to join the family of Chief William “Ryan” Owens, as America’s fallen hero was returned home. Very, very sad, but very, very beautiful. Very, very beautiful. His family was there. Incredible family, loved him so much. So devastated — he was so devastated. But the ceremony was amazing. He died in defense of our nation. He gave his life in defense of our people. Our debt to him and our debt to his family is eternal and everlasting.
“Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends.” We will never forget the men and women who wear the uniform, believe me. (Applause.) Thank you. From generation to generation, their vigilance has kept our liberty alive. Our freedom is won by their sacrifice, and our security has been earned with their sweat and blood and tears. God has blessed this land to give us such incredible heroes and patriots. They are very, very special, and we are going to take care of them. (Applause.)
Our soldiers understand that what matters is not party or ideology or creed, but the bonds of loyalty that link us all together as one. America is a nation of believers. In towns all across our land, it’s plain to see what we easily forget — so easily we forget this — that the quality of our lives is not defined by our material success, but by our spiritual success. I will tell you that. And I tell you that from somebody that has had material success and knows tremendous numbers of people with great material success — the most material success. Many of those people are very, very miserable, unhappy people. And I know a lot of people without that, but they have great families, they have great faith. They don’t have money — at least not nearly to the extent — and they’re happy. Those to me are the successful people, I have to tell you. (Applause.)
I was blessed to be raised in a churched home. My mother and father taught me that to whom much is given much is expected. I was sworn in on the very bible from which my mother would teach us as young children. And that faith lives on in my heart every single day.
The people in this room come from many, many backgrounds. You represent so many religions and so many views. But we are all united by our faith in our Creator and our firm knowledge that we are all equal in His eyes. We are not just flesh and bone and blood. We are human beings, with souls. Our Republic was formed on the basis that freedom is not a gift from government, but that freedom is a gift from God. (Applause.) It was the great Thomas Jefferson who said, “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty.” Jefferson asked, “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”
Among those freedoms is the right to worship according to our own beliefs. That is why I will get rid of, and totally destroy, the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution. I will do that — remember. (Applause.)
Freedom of religion is a sacred right, but it is also a right under threat all around us, and the world is under serious, serious threat in so many different ways. And I’ve never seen it so much and so openly as since I took the position of President. The world is in trouble, but we’re going to straighten it out. Okay? That’s what I do. I fix things. We’re going to straighten it out. (Applause.) Believe me. When you hear about the tough phone calls I’m having, don’t worry about it. Just don’t worry about it. (Laughter.) They’re tough. We have to be tough. It’s time we’re going to be a little tough, folks. We’re taken advantage of by every nation in the world, virtually. It’s not going to happen anymore. It’s not going to happen anymore.
We have seen unimaginable violence carried out in the name of religion. Acts of wanton slaughter against religious minorities. Horrors on a scale that defy description. Terrorism is a fundamental threat to religious freedom. It must be stopped, and it will be stopped. It may not be pretty for a little while. It will be stopped. (Applause.)
We have seen — and, by the way, General, as you know, James “Mad Dog” — I shouldn’t say it in this room — Mattis. Now, there’s a reason they call him “Mad Dog Mattis” — he never lost a battle. Always wins them and always wins them fast. He’s our new Secretary of Defense who will be working with Rex. He’s right now in South Korea, going to Japan, going to some other spots. And I’ll tell you what, I’ve gotten to know him really well. He’s the real deal. We have somebody who’s the real deal working for us, and that’s what we need. So, you watch. You just watch. (Applause.) Things will be different.
We have seen peace-loving Muslims brutalized, victimized, murdered and oppressed by ISIS killers. We have seen threats of extermination against the Jewish people. We have seen a campaign of ISIS and genocide against Christians, where they cut off heads. Not since the Middle Ages have we seen that. We haven’t seen that, the cutting off of heads. Now they cut off their heads, they drown people in steel cages. Haven’t seen this — I haven’t seen this. Nobody has seen this for many, many years.
All nations have a moral obligation to speak out against such violence. All nations have a duty to work together to confront it and to confront it viciously, if we have to. So I want to express clearly today to the American people that my administration will do everything in its power to defend and protect religious liberty in our land. America must forever remain a tolerant society where all faiths are respected, and where all of our citizens can feel safe and secure. We have to feel safe and secure.
In recent days, we have begun to take necessary action to achieve that goal. Our nation has the most generous immigration system in the world. But these are those and there are those that would exploit that generosity to undermine the values that we hold so dear. We need security. There are those who would seek to enter our country for the purpose of spreading violence or oppressing other people based upon their faith or their lifestyle. Not right. We will not allow a beachhead of intolerance to spread in our nation. You look all over the world and you see what’s happening.
So in the coming days, we will develop a system to help ensure that those admitted into our country fully embrace our values of religious and personal liberty, and that they reject any form of oppression and discrimination. We want people to come into our nation, but we want people to love us and to love our values — not to hate us and to hate our values. We will be a safe country. We will be a free country. And we will be a country where all citizens can practice their beliefs without fear of hostility or fear of violence. America will flourish as long as our liberty and, in particular, our religious liberty is allowed to flourish. (Applause.)
America will succeed as long as our most vulnerable citizens — and we have some that are so vulnerable — have a path to success. And America will thrive as long as we continue to have faith in each other and faith in God. (Applause.)
That faith in God has inspired men and women to sacrifice for the needy, to deploy to wars overseas, and to lock arms at home, to ensure equal rights for every man, woman and child in our land. It’s that faith that sent the pilgrims across the oceans, the pioneers across the plains, and the young people all across America to chase their dreams. They are chasing their dreams. We are going to bring those dreams back. As long as we have God, we are never, ever alone. Whether it’s the soldier on the night watch or the single parent on the night shift, God will always give us solace and strength and comfort.
We need to carry on and to keep carrying on. For us here in Washington, we must never, ever stop asking God for the wisdom to serve the public according to his will. That’s why — (applause) — thank you. That’s why President Eisenhower and Senator Carlson had the wisdom to gather together 64 years ago to begin this truly great tradition. But that’s not all they did together. Let me tell you the rest of the story. Just one year later, Senator Carlson was among the members of Congress to send to the President’s desk a joint resolution that added “under God” to our Pledge of Allegiance. That’s a great thing. (Applause.) Because that’s what we are and that is what we will always be, and that is what our people want: one beautiful nation, under God.
Thank you. God bless you. And God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause.)
END
For more news from the White House go to: www.whitehouse.gov
Peanut Gallery: While the sound and fury of the Left are directed at Trump’s style, the substance of his policies are returning America to normalcy.
Victor Davis Hanson spells it out in his excellent article “When normalcy is revolution.”
Trump’s often unorthodox style shouldn’t be confused with his otherwise practical and mostly centrist agenda.
[Read more… via Donald Trump’s ‘Conservative’ Agenda: Not Radical, More Centrist | National Review]
Posted: January 31, 2017 by Tyler O’Neil on PJ Media. [see original]
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump nominated appellate judge Neil Gorsuch to serve on the Supreme Court. Trump fulfilled his pledge to select a nominee “in the mold of Antonin Scalia,” for Gorsuch seems cut from exactly the same cloth.
Like Scalia, Gorsuch is both a textualist and an originalist — he interprets legal provisions as their words were originally understood, and not according to doctrines like the “Living Constitution.” This is important, and points to how he will rule on pivotal cases if confirmed by the Senate.
1. Young but well qualified
Gorsuch, at the age of 49, would be the youngest Supreme Court justice in 30 years (since Clarence Thomas was confirmed at age 43). But this relative youth does not translate to inexperience.
Gorsuch attended Columbia University and Harvard Law School, and then he clerked for Washington, D.C. Circuit Court judge David Sentelle. He also clerked for Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy in the years 1993 and 1994. Following these clerkships, he studied for a doctorate of philosophy at Oxford University under the legal philosopher John Finnis.
Next, he spent ten years at a law firm in Washington, D.C., and then worked for the Justice Department under President George W. Bush. Bush nominated him to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he has served ever since. This court covers Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Gorsuch was confirmed quickly and without controversy.
2. Passes Scalia’s diversity test
The late Justice Scalia laid out a blueprint to achieve diversity on the Supreme Court. While Gorsuch does not check off every single box, he does represent a strong step in the right direction.
In his scathing dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the case that legalized homosexual marriage across America, Scalia argued that there should be “no social transformation without representation.” He attacked the current makeup of the Court:
Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination.
Gorsuch studied law at Harvard, but he also studied at Oxford. He grew up in “the vast expanse in-between,” the southwestern state of Colorado — a true western state if there ever was one. He is also a Protestant, specifically an Episcopalian.
Gorsuch serves as an usher at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, and his wife gives the sermon and leads intercessory prayer on occasion. Interestingly, the rector (head pastor) of his church, Susan Woodward Springer, attended the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and praised the march (which excluded pro-life women and reportedly mistreated them when they showed up anyway) as a “glorious, unified, peaceful, friendly law-abiding crowd.” Nevertheless, even if Springer does support abortion, it is quite possible for Gorsuch to be pro-life.
When PJ Media reached out to the church for comment, the rector was out of town and the assistant said, “I can’t speak for her.”
3. Originalist
Whatever his position on abortion, Judge Gorsuch is a staunch originalist in the mold of Antonin Scalia, as revealed in a tribute Gorsuch gave after Scalia’s death. The judge summarized and endorsed Scalia’s method of legal interpretation.
Judges should instead strive (if humanly and so imperfectly) to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be — not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best. As Justice Scalia put it, “if you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.”
Gorsuch’s originalist philosophy is not just in the mold of Scalia — it’s also what Americans prefer. Eighty percent of Americans described it as an “immediate priority” or at least an “important” one to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will preserve the original meaning of the Constitution, according to a recent Marist/Knights of Columbus poll.
4. Religious freedom
Two of Gorsuch’s most famous decisions concern religious freedom. He concurred with a decision freeing Hobby Lobby from the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate. Some of the contraceptives which the administration required Hobby Lobby to cover could be seen as abortifacients, and so the owners of the chain objected to the mandate for that reason. After Gorsuch sided with Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court sided with him, affirming the decision 5-4.
In a similar case, he dissented from a decision against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Roman Catholic charity. The court decided that this charity had to pay fines levied by the Obama administration because it refused to comply with the contraceptive mandate. Gorsuch argued that the Little Sisters had shown that the fine amounted to a substantial burden on their exercise of religion, and thus fell under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The Supreme Court unanimously struck down the decision from which Gorsuch had dissented.
Gorsuch explained that RFRA “doesn’t just apply to protect popular religious beliefs: it does perhaps its most important work in protecting unpopular religious beliefs, vindicating this nation’s long-held aspiration to serve as a refuge of religious tolerance.”
5. Reining in administrative agencies
National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru argued that while Gorsuch follows the mold of Scalia in many important ways, the new justice would likely deviate from his predecessor as well. “He may be more willing than Scalia was to rein in administrative agencies,” Ponnuru suggested.
Gorsuch’s record points to such a tendency, because “he has called into question Supreme Court precedents that command judicial deference to the legal interpretations of those agencies. He has been skeptical, as well, of agencies that purport to apply regulations retroactively.”
This mistrust of regulatory agencies and the red tape they produce seems confirmed by Gorsuch’s skepticism of the “dormant commerce clause.” This longstanding legal doctrine states that the Constitution’s infamous “commerce clause,” granting Congress the authority to regulate interstate commerce, implies limits on states’ power even when Congress has not spelled out those limits. Disagreeing with this broad interpretation of the commerce clause puts Gorsuch squarely in line with conservatives who wish to curtail the size and scope of the bureaucracy.
Indeed, it also puts the Colorado judge in line with the Trump administration’s goals. On Monday, the president signed an executive order stipulating that for every new regulation, the administrative agencies must eliminate two old regulations. This is a big step forward, because there is reason to believe that Americans actually pay more in regulations (in terms of higher costs for basic goods, economic inefficiencies from red tape, and other things) than in taxes.
All in all, Gorsuch seems a stunning pick for the Supreme Court. Let’s hope his confirmation for this seat goes as smoothly as his confirmation for the 10th Circuit.
The Peanut Gallery 